News

News

November 14, 2013,
Article

Article

An Angel in New York: Joe Zawadzki

In 2007, Zawadzki founded MediaMath, the first demand-side platform in the online marketing industry. The platform uses the best practices from technology, marketing, data and analytics to streamline buy-side media trading. Its TerminalOne Marketing Operating System uses algorithmic optimization, audience buying and contextual targeting to simplify the execution, optimization and analysis of both branding and direct response campaigns.

In 2011, AdAge declared MediaMath the winner of the first Forrester Research Wave Report on DSPs. In January of this year, MediaMath acquired Akamai’s data platform to expand on the company’s data-management features.

Prior to his success with MediaMath, Zawadzki was founder, president and chairman of Poindexter Systems – now known as [x+1] – a pure-play marketing optimization company. In 2006, [x+1] was named one of Inc.’s top 500 fastest growing companies. The startup recently made headlines in April when it received $17 million in funding from Ares Capital.

Zawadzki holds several patents, including nos. 20080097832, 20020188508 and 7,313,622, which are classified as online methods for dynamic segmentation and content presentation.

Outside of his success as an entrepreneur, he is an active investor in the technology sector. Since 2005, he has been the managing director of Porcellian Capital, LLC, a seed and Series A stage investment fund.

Zawadzki graduated from Harvard University with a BA in English, and was a teaching fellow in cosmology, set theory and the history of science.

He is also actively involved with Hope for Vision, an organization that raises money to develop treatments and cures for blinding diseases.

On logos: “To a great extent, marketers are out there catching up to consumer behavior, and that’s resulting in lots of logos as lots of people come up with their own special secret sauce in terms of how to do something with the new opportunities that digital marketing presents.”

On marketing digital media: “If you extract away all of the fancy buzzwords, it’s really about trying to make marketing simple. It’s taking innovative things, taking new forms of media, taking new forms of data, taking the tools that you need in order to make better decisions and putting them all together.”

On grounding the things we do: “I think sometimes we are so interested in the trees that we lose sight of the forest.”

On programmatic marketing: “It’s this idea that I’m not going to talk to little pockets of users in different ways and try to stitch together this tapestry of techniques. It’s really trying to put everybody into this soup of media and data, and to be able to understand for every given user, what it is I want to say to them. Ask yourself what the next step is in this user’s journey with your brand.”